Teachers and Parents Experimenting with Research Formative Intervention for Expansive Learning when Implementing a New Reading Method

This paper presents the analysis of 5 Change Laboratory sessions that were held in an elementary school in Quebec with teachers and parents in the context of the implementation of a new reading method. The Change Laboratory methodology rooted in the theory of expansive learning sugggests the accompaniment by a research team of participants engaged in change management. A typical sequence of actions put in place during a CL comprises six phases: questioning, analysis, modeling new models, examining and testing the new model, implementing and reflecting on the process when the transformation becomes collective (Engestrom, 2015). The results illustrate how parents and teachers co-modelled tools and visions to put in place a zone of proximal development between them and engage in relational agency for the benefit of the children. The implementation led to reflections on their actions with the goal of improving their joined experience.